AC6 is an empire-management game like SRE. The main difference is the setting: in SRE, players ruled "solar empires" of planets, competing against other empires across a galaxy; in AC6, players assemble terrestrial empires of territories.

Like SRE, the goal in AC6 is to become and remain the most powerful empire. Players gain strength by buying forces, and gain size by acquiring land. Players must provide food and spend money to maintain their empire's population, army, and territory, or else suffer civil unrest. New players are given a short period of protection, during which they cannot attack or be attacked. Players can forge alliances, or wage war with competitors using conventional, guerilla, nuclear, chemical, and covert attacks.

Mehul Patel created AC6 in 1991. While the game is nearly identical in many respects to Solar Realms Elite, Patel attempted to make the attack and covert operations more realistic by lengthening the time it takes for them to return, and by providing many more choices for options.

The sysop documentation included with AC6 mentioned inter-BBS features were planned for the future. But one of the (apparently later) in-game bulletins states that AC6 would not support inter-BBS warfare because "the design has too many problems to support these features." Instead, it touted its successor, Barren Realms Elite as a new game with full inter-BBS support.

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Origins and influences

The first of the so-called "SR Games," Solar Realms Elite, was written by Mehul Patel's brother, Amit, in 1990.[1][2] Alpha Colony VI was the next of the brothers' games to be released, in 1991. Mehul later created BRE, Falcon's Eye, Falcon's Honor, and The Arcadian Legends (all of which were later sold to John Dailey Software[3]).

SRE was written in C++, but BRE and AC6 were written in Turbo Pascal.[4] The sysop documentation for AC6 says Mehul wrote AC6 partially on a "4.77 MHz CGA computer."